the very object for which all that is kind and good in man rises up to plead,-from the bosom of its mother, and carry it out to be eaten by the wolves of Taygetus. We feel a glow of admiration at the heroism displayed at Marathon by the ten thousand champions of invaded Greece; but we cannot forget that the tenth part of the number were slaves, unchained from the workshops and door-posts of their masters, to go and fight the battles of freedom. I do not mean that these examples are to destroy the interest with which we read the history of ancient times; they possibly increase that interest, by the singular contrast they exhibit. But they do warn us, if we need the warning, to seek our great practical lessons of patriotism at home; out of the exploits and sacrifices of which our own country is the theatre; out of the characters of our own fathers. Them we know, the high-souled, natural, unaffected, the citizen heroes. We know what happy firesides they left for the cheerless camp. We know with what pacific habits they dared the perils of the field. There is no mystery, no romance, no madness, under the name of chivalry, about them. It is all resolute, manly resistance-for conscience' and liberty's sake-not merely of an overwhelming power, but of all the force of long-rooted habits, and the native love of order and peace.

LUTHER.

In the solemn loneliness, in which Luther found himself, he called around him not so much the masters of the Greek and Latin wisdom through the study of the ancient languages, as he did the mass of his own countrymen, by his translation of the Bible. It would have been a matter of tardy impression and remote efficacy, had he done no more than awake from the dusty alcoves of the libraries the venerable shades of the classic teachers. He roused up a population of living, sentient men, his countrymen, his brethren. He might have written and preached in Latin to his dying day, and the elegant Italian scholars, champions of the church, would have answered him in Latin better than his own; and with the mass of the people, the whole affair would have been a contest between angry and loquacious priests. "Awake all antiquity from the sleep of the libraries!" He awoke all Germany and half Europe from the scholastic sleep of an ignorance worse than death. He took into his hands not the oaten pipe of the classic muse; he moved to his great work, not

-to the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorders;He grasped the iron trumpet of his mother tongue, -the good old Saxon from which our own is descended, the language of noble thought and high resolve, and blew a blast that shook the nations from Rome to the Orkneys. Sovereign, citizen,

and peasant, started at the sound; and, in a few short years, the poor monk, who had begged his bread for a pious canticle in the streets of Eisenach, no longer friendless,-no longer solitary,was sustained by victorious armies, countenanced by princes, and, what is a thousand times more precious than the brightest crown in Christendom, revered as a sage, a benefactor, and a spiritual parent, at the firesides of millions of his humble and grateful countrymen.

LITERATURE AND LIBERTY.

LITERATURE is the voice of the age and the state. The character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds. They are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires. They do not create, they obey the spirit of the age; the serene and beautiful spirit descended from the highest heaven of liberty, who laughs at our preconceptions, and, with the breath of his mouth, sweeps before him the men and the nations that cross his path. By an unconscious instinct, the mind, in the action of its powers, adapts itself to the number and complexion of the other minds with which it is to enter into communion or conflict. As the voice falls into the key which is suited to the space to be filled, the mind, in the various exercises of its creative faculties, strives with curious search for that master-note, which will awaken a vibration from the surrounding community, and which, if it do not find it, is itself too often struck dumb.

The pa

For this reason, from the moment in the destiny of nations, that they descend from their culminating point, and begin to decline, from that moment the voice of creative genius is hushed, and at best, the age of criticism, learning, and imitation succeeds. When Greece ceased to be independent, the forum and the stage became mute. tronage of Macedonian, Alexandrian, and Pergamean princes was lavished in vain. They could not woo the healthy Muses of Hellas, from the cold mountain tops of Greece, to dwell in their gilded halls. Nay, though the fall of greatness, the decay of beauty, the waste of strength, and the wreck of power have ever been among the favourite themes of the pensive muse, yet not a poet arose in Greece to chant her own elegy; and it is after near three centuries, and from Cicero and Sulpicius, that we catch the first notes of pious and pathetic lamentation over the fallen land of the The freedom and genius of a country are invariably gathered into a common tomb, and there -can only strangers breathe The name of that which was beneath.

arts.